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for Kathy Cox, Georgia Superintendent of Schools, for being the first million-dollar winner on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

An even huger hooray for what she did with the money: she donated it to three Georgia schools, including a school for the blind and a school for the deaf.

Resounding boos go to those who stooped to petty partisan politics, including GA Rep Rob Tielhet, who took out an ad on the show asking what she was doing in Hollywood when Georgia schools were struggling. Apparently, he is not smarter than a 5th grader. She did the show on her own time, and now she is sharing her winnings with Georgia’s schoolkids.

Hooray for Kathy Cox!

I am subscribed to one less person, and one less person is subscribed to me. So, whoever it was, we were subscribed to each other.

Any ideas?

And by the way, has anyone heard from Gemm?

It is due on Monday. I do not want to fill it out.

My question is, will chocolate make it go away?

Someone bought the lot next to ours and is building a humongous house. Even since the house started taking shape, I have been dying to go over, walk around, and generally play Nosy McNeighborson.

I finally got a chance to do that last week. I was over at the edge of our lot, and it was easy to step onto the next one and look around. The house was locked, darn it, but I did peek in a few windows and look around the outside. The house has three levels, and even with three levels, its “footprint” is larger than that of our one-level house. There is a four-car garage. I think it may be the biggest house in our small subdivision.

When we moved here, five years ago, there were just four houses. One was quite large; the others were about the same size as ours, maybe a tad larger. Since then, people have been buying lots and building houses that range in size from large to humongous. Fine with me . . . it sure can’t hurt our property values!

So the news is out that maybe cell phones cause cancer after all, and a story on msn.com (cleverly titled “The Cell Tolls for Thee) lists the ten worst phones:

The 10 worst cell phones according to their SAR numbers:

1. Motorola V195s 1.6
2. Motorola Slvr L6 1.58
3. Motorola Slvr L2 1.54
4. Motorola W385 1.54
5. Rim BlackBerry Curve 8330 (Sprint) 1.54
6. Rim BlackBerry Curve 8330 (Verizon) 1.54
7. Motorola Deluxe ic902 1.53
8. T-Mobile Shadow 1.53
9. Motorola i335 1.53
10. Samsung Sync SGH-C417 1.51

And which one do I have? That’s right, the #1 brain-cancer-inducing phone. And I just bought it.

Not happy here.

Now I have to decide, do I waste the money (okay, the $8) that I spent on it and buy another, safer, phone, or do I worry that a glioma is forming insider my head every time I use it.

And another thing I have to ask. Why am I even asking this? It’s a no-brainer (pun intended). Spring for another phone. I only have one brain.

tired.

this entry by Razz, I have been pondering neighborhoods and how they seem to go bad so quickly in the state she and I both live in.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Virginia that was far from rich. It had small post-WWII housing like I lived in with my mother and grandparents. I doubt that house was 1000 square feet.
there was a 4-unit apartment on the corner. There were small 1950s brick houses. There were large houses from the 1920s. It was a great place to live. My mother rented an apartment in that neighborhood on the second floor of one of the big houses. I later rented the attic of one of the big houses. The last time I saw that neighborhood, long after my granddad’s death, it looked even better. New people had moved in and spiffed up the houses.

So different here in Georgia. My hubby and I bought our first house in a new-ish subdivision in 1989. Many of the people there were first-time homebuyers, as were we, and we were all proud of our houses. By the time we moved out in 2003, there were discarded stoves and refrigerators in people’s yards and cars up on blocks. We had to pick trash out of our yard that people had thrown as they went by. Shortly after we moved, the garage of the house across the street from us exploded because people were making meth there.

I know part of the reason: HUD had bought a few of the houses there, and some of the people who moved in felt no reason to take care of something they had not earned. They saw no reason not to scream obscenities in the middle of the street at midnight because they did not have to get up and go to work like the rest of us. (Cooking meth can be done anytime of the day or night.)

But this is the norm in the city where I live. People worry about their parents, who still live in the house where they brought up their kids, because the neighborhood has “gone bad” around them.

When we moved from our first neighborhood, which had “gone bad,” I told my hubby I wanted to move someplace where I would never see a refrigerator on someone’s front porch, a car on blocks in the front yard, or a meth lab across the street.

And lest anyone assume, this has nothing to do with race or “white flight.” The social worker who lived next door to us and went off to work every day was black. The lowlife meth cookers were white.

I just don’t understand what happens. Where I grew up, you wanted to stay in your neighborhood. Here, you want to get the hell out.

went on the fritz this past weekend. The switchplate started buzzing and smoke came out, and they died.

Okay, I am not a handy person, but I thought, “I can do this.”

So today I took out the old switch and went with it to Home Depot. There were no switches tomatch it, and it took me frigging forever to find someone to help me. It turns out that because it’s a dimmer switch, it’s three aisles down. If my head had been going to explode, it would have done so then.

I took it home. I turned off the receptacle at the breaker box and carefully attached all the wires. I accidentally pulled out the green ground wire and had to figure out where it went. Finally, I got it all attached and tried it out. Zip. Zero. Nada.

I kept messing with it, but nothing. My head was ready to explode again, but it was time to go to work.

Came home. Messed a bit more. Went online, read some directions, which were EXACTLY WHAT I HAD DONE. Head . . . will . . . explode . . . now.

Just an update on my last entry on the subject of my hubby’s faceblindness.

How is it going? Just great, thank you! Every morning, I orient him: “You are Nick, and I am your wife Jessy. We live here at (our address) with our two cats, Molly and Lilly.” He loves it. If I pause, he’ll sometimes say, “Yes?” as in “Go on.”

Before anyone comes in, I say, “This is going to be X, your (caregiver, friend, whoever).”

Anytime I can give him a clue or hint, I do. It is working so beautifully.

I’m happy, too. Even if he has an occasional lapse, he clearly knows who I am and what our relationship is most of the time. And every time he reads my dog tag that says, “Nick, I am your wife, Jessy,” he smiles a big smile. Yay.

1. He never just fixes the problem I call about, he says, “From the look of this thingamajig, I’d better check all your toilets and replace all of them so you won’t have to call me again so soon.”
2. He tells me about the latest advances in plumbing, like the new toilets that will suck down five golf balls and a piece of air-filled packing material with one flush. If I ever want to flush golf balls, I’ll be right on it.
3. He is a small businessman and a one-man operation. Generally, folks like these do a good job, since their livelihood depends on it.
4. When I call and leave a message, he or his wife will get right back to me.
5. He was recommended by a friend who trusts him enough to leave a key under the mat for him.
6. His charges are quite reasonable.
7. Plenty of experience. He started plumbing right out of high school and must be sixty-some now. I’ll be sorry when he retires.